Introduction

Routine vaccinations are given to many children. Physicians refer to them as the “baby shots.” There are also special vaccinations for people in high-risk settings—such as travelers about to enplane to a hazardous country.

How should we relate to vaccinations for ourselves and our children? Here is some data which may provide help.

Because there are many questions about vaccinations, and because there is a strong movement on foot to require every child in the land to receive a complete series of them—this brief overview of the vaccination problem has been prepared.

However, the decision whether or not to vaccinate is a personal one. The author is a researcher and not a health practitioner. This is a decision you must make personally. It is hoped that this data will provide you with the basis for additional study on your own. Only in that way can you make an intelligent decision.

Vaccines primarily consist of dead or weakened (“attenuated”) germs of the same type of disease, which are injected into the body in the hope that it will stimulate the organism to produce protein antibodies to protect it against disease.

There is growing pressure, from special interest groups, to require nationwide vaccination of children. In view of that fact, there is an urgent need to examine the information available on this matter.

“There is a growing suspicion that immunization against relatively harmless childhood diseases may be responsible for the dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases since mass inoculations were introduced. These are fearful diseases such as cancer, leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

“An autoimmune disease can be explained simply as one in which the body’s defense mechanisms cannot distinguish between foreign invaders and ordinary body tissues, with the consequence that the body begins to destroy itself. Have we traded mumps and measles for cancer and leukemia?”—Robert Mendelsohn, How to Raise a Healthy Child, p. 211.

Let us begin with the “mandatory” vaccinations. These are the ones which, in most states, your child is required to take in order to be admitted to public school.